2011 January

LiveJournal Tags: Leaving,Colleagues She announced it before Christmas, in a letter, giving the exact day she intended to leave and what she had planned for her future. We met 8 years ago. We were looking for a data administrator for a CRM system in the company and she was the stand out candidate. She got […]

When I was just nine years of age my father introduced me to the computer. It was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer (aka: CoCo). He shared with me the nuances of writing BASIC and it wasn’t long before I was in the back seat of the school bus scribbling, on a pad of paper, […]

LiveJournal Tags: How To,SQL Server,Tips and Tricks,TSQL,Reporting Services A little while ago I wrote a piece about finding database objects that rely on other objects that no longer exist – OK, I have my database ready, now what’s missing? . This is linked to that sort of process. Many SQL Server installations are associated in […]

One of my first questions, when interviewing for a DBA/Programmer position, is always: “Why do you want this job?” The answers I receive range from cheesy hyperbole (“I want to enhance your services with my vast knowledge”) to deadpan realism (“I have N kids who all have a hole in the front of their face […]

If you speak to Microsoft, they’ll give you a number of active accounts, but what are those accounts actually running? It could be a collection of Hello World ASP.NET sites, or perhaps small exciting web start-ups, or maybe even the beginnings of large corporate moves to the cloud! I guess what I really wanted to […]

There are two ways to send mail in SharePoint: you can either use the mail components from the System.Net namespace, or you can send email using SharePoint’s SPUtility.SendMail method. One of the benefits of the SPUtility.SendMail method is that it uses the mail configuration from SharePoint, so you can manage settings in Central Administration instead […]

I would like to tell you how to revolutionize your software development process </marketing hyperbole> On a more serious note, we (Red Gate’s .NET Development team) recently rolled a new tool into our development process which has made our lives dramatically easier AND improved the quality of our software, and I (& one of our […]

Control flow in and around exception handlers is tightly controlled, due to the various ways the handler blocks can be executed. To start off with, I’ll describe what SEH does when an exception is thrown. Handling exceptions When an exception is thrown, the CLR stops program execution at the throw statement and searches up the […]

LiveJournal Tags: RedGate Tools,SQL Server,Tips and Tricks How To The requested page cannot be accessed because the related configuration data for the page is invalid. As part of my work recently I was moving SQL Monitor from the bespoke XSP web server to be hosted on IIS instead. This didn’t go smoothly. I was lucky […]